Pay close attention to how the CX landscape is shifting in 2022, so you stay competitive and continue to enhance the customer experience.

For many companies, February 1 is the start of the new fiscal year. Here at SupportLogic, the first week of February has us thinking about the year ahead and changes on the CX horizon.

In the burgeoning pandemic economy, support organizations are undergoing unique pressures to provide timely, personalized, and highly effective service.

Old schools of thought in the customer experience world are shifting. Proactive support frameworks are becoming the new norm, and there’s a greater emphasis on curbing agent attrition in the face of The Great Resignation, among other trends.

Pay close attention to how the CX landscape is shifting in 2022, so you stay competitive and continue to enhance the customer experience.

Reactive support is giving way to proactive support frameworks

With reactive support, agents are “fighting fires” and jumping on problems as they arise. Proactive support focuses on prediction and prevention via tools like customer sentiment monitoring, so support teams can nip potential issues in the bud.

Customers have always loved quick issue resolutions, but in 2022, proactive support is more important than ever. A whopping 87% of customers want companies to set standards and provide a higher level of service.

In order to curb churn and retain customers, customer service teams should opt for proactive support over reactive support—something over 80% of customers want companies to do anyway. With customer acquisition costs (CAC) being what they are (between $487 to $900 for each customer), shifting to a proactive support framework is vital for retaining customers, especially in B2B SaaSindustries where a product similar to yours is just down the road.

How do you shift from a reactive to a proactive B2B support model? Start analyzing customer sentiment, so you can identify and resolve potential issues before they become relationship-damaging grievances—and especially before the customer escalates the problem.

A tool like SupportLogic uses AI with natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer sentiment. It does this by scanning the content and historical context of your customer support tickets and mining those support interactions to identify when a customer may be getting frustrated or upset.

It then alerts the support team, so they can take a closer look and proactively resolve the situation.

Agent attrition is increasing, so improving the employee experience is key

Support agents are very much a part of The Great Resignation—especially as customer inquiries have gone up during the pandemic. Ticket numbers are up 20% since the start of the pandemic, according to a report from Zendesk.

If agents are constantly firefighting and jumping from case to case, they’re more likely to experience burnout and potentially quit. Quality monitoring programs can help support teams reduce agent attrition rates (and keep customers happy, too). Quality monitoring reduces the likelihood of customer escalation and churn by providing agents with data about the customer experience that allows agents to be more proactive. And yet, according to that same Zendesk report from earlier, most agents don’t have access to common customer data.

A solution like SupportLogic’s Support Experience Platform empowers managers and agents to head off customer issues before they become crises. It gives agents and managers access to common data types, as well as sentiment scores, churn risk, and product feedback, so there’s visible context before going into a support conversation.

Using SupportLogic, support managers can assign cases based on a real-time assessment of the severity of the issue or churn risk, setting agents up for greater success–which, in turn, improves the employee experience.

In addition to using SupportLogic SX, Snowflake’s Angus Klein, VP of global support improves the agent experience with coaching and cross-departmental mingling. He places developers alongside support teams for a week or more, so engineering teams have a greater understanding of the support process and how their work can make agents’ lives easier. The same goes for top support experts at Snowflake; they’re spending up to a quarter of their time working with engineering to gain a deeper knowledge of the product, the processes behind development, and the challenges of engineering.

To protect and grow revenue, the voice of the customer should include real-time customer sentiment

The traditional way of measuring Voice of the Customer (VoC) is to look at lagging indicators. You might review NPS and CSAT scores from a few months ago to understand how customers felt then—but you don’t know how those customers feel about your brand now. By the time you’re reviewing the scores, customers could have escalated the problem or even churned.

Today’s VoC analysis should show what customers are thinking now and even what they might do tomorrow or next week, so support teams know how to intervene before an issue escalates or even goes nuclear.

But how do you expand VoC analysis to reflect customers’ current feelings? SupportLogic SX can help by offering sentiment scores, which provide holistic impressions of the customer’s feelings, and predictive alerts, so agents can head off problems before they arise.

2022 is the year of purpose-built AI in B2B support

Purpose-built AI is like other AI in some ways—both act intelligently in a given business scenario based on data they were trained on and utilize technologies like NLP to read tone and voice. Purpose-built AI, however, brings additional benefits to the table.

• Named entity recognition (NER) enhances NLP to scan entire articles, emails, or blocks of text to pull out fundamental entities and then classify them based on the categories you’ve set up. In the realm of support, this makes it easier to assign scores to customer interactions.
• Domain knowledge so the AI can operate within the contexts and workflows of a given industry. This means they’re trained on the terms and knowledge that comprise an industry, like support, making it easier to read customer interactions and pull insights for improvement.
• Ready-made workflows that are tailored toward customer support and customer success reduce the workload on agents and speed up customer resolutions.
• Regulatory compliance autonomously handles the collection, classification, and storage of customer information based on standards and best practices.

To handle customer problems with the high level of personalization today’s consumers expect, support teams can’t use just any solution. They need support technology that’s customized for their industry’s unique needs.

For example, SupportLogic SX is a purpose-built system for B2B customer support teams. Our platform’s AI and NLP technology is equipped with knowledge from over 60 million B2B support interactions.

Looking ahead to 2022 and beyond

We expect 2022 to be another year of change in the realm of customer experience and support. Driven by both the pandemic and other factors, these four trends will continue to define and shape the industry for years to come. And staying ahead of the curve couldn’t be more vital in the face of agent churn, expanding notions of VoC, and the rising demand for proactive support.

Customized for B2B customer support organizations, SupportLogic SX empowers you to provide proactive support, predict and prevent customer escalations, reduce agent churn, and protect your bottom line. Get started with a test drive today, and help your team provide a world-class CX experience.